Lorenzo:
. . .
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
Come ho, and wake Diana with a hymn!
With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' ear
And draw her home with music.
Jessica:
I am never merry when I hear sweet music.
Lorenzo:
The reason is, your spirits are attentive.
For do but note a wild and wanton herd
Or race of youthful and unhandled colts
Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud,
Which is the hot condition of their blood:
If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,
Or any air of music touch their ears,
You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,
Their savage eyes turned to a modest gaze
By the sweet power of music. Therefore the poet
Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods;
Since naught so stockish, hard, and full of rage
But music for the time doth change his nature.
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
The Merchant of Venice, Act V, scene 1, ll 55 - 88
For Shakespeare's birthday, an excerpt from The Merchant of Venice. Like Twelfth Night, it is an odd and melancholy play, permeated by music, with a comic villain whose treatment is likely to win an audience's sympathies and whose heroes are sadly selfish. This passage comes towards the end, after the famous trial scene. We switch to Portia's house; Lorenzo and his new bride Jessica, the fugitive daughter of Shylock, are awaiting her return. Under the moonlight, the young newlyweds evoke the nocturnal atmosphere by citing famous lovers; each reference begins like an incantation with the phrase In such a night (this is the passage Berlioz drew on for Dido and Aeneas's duet Nuit d'ivresse et d'extase infinie / Intoxicating night of infinite ecstasy in his opera Les Troyens). But the swoony-soft mood of erotic teasing is not all that far removed after all from the harrowing court and its grinding wheels of justice and mercy: each of the mythical lovers referenced – Troilus and Cressida, Pyramus and Thisbe, Dido and Aeneas, Medea and Jason – came to spectacularly bad ends. It seems like a bad sign when Lorenzo and Jessica playfully add themselves to the list.
The patens to which Lorenzo compares the stars (the floor of heaven is / thick inlaid with patens of bright gold) are small plates, usually made of precious metals, used for holding the bread during the Eucharist, which seems suitably heavenly. He then refers to the divine music that Ptolemaic astronomy said was produced by the movements of the celestial spheres: there's not the smallest orb . . . / But in his motion like an angel sings, / still quiring [that is, acting like a choir] to the young-eyed cherubins [cherubim]. But again the note of sadness comes in: we cannot hear it while we are alive, while the muddy [since man was made from dust] vesture of decay [our bodies are compared to clothing, which will decay and be cast off] grossly [that is, crudely] closes in our immortal part. And notice how the sound of his speech has changed: from the soft murmuring ms (moonlight, music) and the sighing long es (sweet, sleeps, creep) and the gentle ss (sweet, sleeps, sounds, soft, stillness, sweet again), it sinks into related but heavier sounds: muddy, decay, grossly. He ends on an erotic note (perhaps thinking of a good use for bodies, since we're trapped in them), calling for a hymn that will wake Diana – suggesting that she will not only pay attention to the hymn as sacred praise of her as goddess of the moon, but also suggesting that it might wake her from her cold nature as the goddess of chastity. Even his instructions to the musicians to play for their mistress Portia's return are phrased erotically: he tells them to pierce her ears with sweetest touches. (Perhaps he's also linking her with the goddess Diana whom he wants them to wake: this will be, after all, Portia's wedding night with Bassanio).
Jessica notes that she is never merry when she hears sweet music. We might associate music with laughter and parties; for her it brings melancholy. Lorenzo replies that it is because it concentrates her spirits – her turbulent inner life – removing her from the physical up to the spiritual, an effect he compares to a herd of wild youthful horses suddenly arrested by music: savage eyes turned to a modest gaze, continuing the link between music and spirituality (and opposed to our fleshly failings) that he began with the description of the music of the spheres. The mythological allusions also continue, as he refers somewhat dismissively, or perhaps, in the flirty mood of the scene, playfully (the poet / Did feign) to the poetic legends of Orpheus, whose music drew to him not only humans and animals but also inanimate objects such as trees, stones, and floods (that is, rivers and streams). Note how the ensuing adjectives balance the nouns: the trees are stockish, that is, stationery, like a block of wood, the stones are hard, the floods are full of rage, that is, violently forceful, the way foaming waters can be. (It's worth noting that, like the mythological lovers mentioned in the opening of the scene, Orpheus, too, came to a bad end, in love and in life.)
Lorenzo says that music changes the nature of these things, but he also suggests that it must connect with something inside a person: the man that hath no music in himself, / nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds – such a man is not to be trusted. The motions of his spirit (that is, his inner urges and compulsions) are as dull as night (apparently Lorenzo is as changeable as the moon and has already forgotten how enticing and beautiful he made the night sound just moments ago; here he uses it more conventionally as a time of darkness and weariness). The man without music has affections (that is, emotions in general, not just likes) as dark as Erebus – the classical Greek personification of primordial darkness (it can also refer to the underworld). This condemnation of the man without music is another reminder of the banished Shylock, who had earlier warned Jessica to lock up his house when she heard the drum / And the vile squealing of the wry-necked fife, and who had cited, as an example of inexplicable but justified natural aversion, those who when the bagpipe sings i' th' nose, / Cannot contain their urine. Part of this reminder of Shylock is of the pain Jessica caused him by her desertion, and the wrong she did him in robbing him before she left. Music under the moonlight comes at a price, and one way or another everyone pays his pound of flesh.
I used the Signet Classic Shakespeare Merchant of Venice but of course there are many editions.
20 April 2015
Poem of the Week 2015/16
Living in Seclusion, Sitting in Silence
Living in seclusion, one can simply do as one pleases,
With a single text, one can forget oneself for a while.
The daylight hours – how much time is there really?
Why then do I not exert myself?
Although the ancients are long gone,
Their wisdom must still be grasped.
From the empty eaves, water keeps on dripping,
From the censer, ashes fall marking the time.
This mood always brings me great pleasure,
As with both hands, I clasp my book tightly.
What a pity it is that ordinary people of the world
Know not this intimacy with the words of the wise!
Jingnuo, translated from the Chinese by Beata Grant
Like the poems from the last two weeks, this one involves our relationship to what we read and how we read it.
Jingnuo was a seventeenth-century Buddhist nun who lived in the Hangzhou province of China. Living apart from the world (which means only the social world), cut off from the entanglements and pressures, the tragedies and trivialities, of conventional social life, she has a certain freedom, which is dedicated to exploring the deeper spiritual aspects of life. Her guides are the thoughts, preserved in writing, of previous nuns and other spiritual sages. Even a single text opens up vistas of thought that remove her from the consciousness of self that limits each of us. Yet far from being lost in a sense of eternity, her religious dedication has given her a keen sense of the passing of time, of how limited and valuable it is – time's passing comes through not in sweeping statements about long spans or epochs, but in the mention of brief, measurable units that make up a life speeding by: the daylight hours, the dripping of water, the fall of ashes from a censer. Given her time and place, her hours of study would be limited by the amount of daylight available. Her awareness of the dripping water gives a sense that she is in as much silence as is possible in this world. The eaves are empty, yet water falls from them drop by drop; eventually it might wear away even a tough stone like granite. A footnote to the poem tells us that the "use of calibrated incense to keep time appears to have originated in Buddhist monasteries; later the 'incense-seal' became a widely used time-keeping device." We have a sense of solitude, of near silence, of near stillness, interrupted only by the gentle drip of water and the scented smoke rising up while the ashes fall down. Though in a state of deep contemplation, Jingnuo is aware of the world around her: the water drops, the ashes. She clasps her book tightly. Far from feeling lonely, isolated, or bored, or even solemn, she feels great joy; a sense of fullness and deep meaning permeates the scene she creates for us. As final proof of her compassionate awareness of the world's problems, she wishes that ordinary men and women could share this happy state that comes from continued intimacy with wise words.
For some ascetics, a love of Nature and poetry is a hindrance rather than a help on the way to enlightenment. Even those who found them useful gateways to spiritual awareness could not avoid a feeling that this, too, was vanity. In her biographical note on Jingnuo, Beata Grant (from whose anthology Daughters of Emptiness: Poems of Chinese Buddhist Nuns I took this poem) ends with these remarks: "Jingnuo also occasionally professed shame at the pleasure she derived from words. Late in life she is said to have noted to a disciple, somewhat ruefully, that 'The religious life does not rely on words and letters. I am already old, and I've managed to cleanse myself of all kinds of attachments; still I laugh at myself and this one remaining thought.' "
Living in seclusion, one can simply do as one pleases,
With a single text, one can forget oneself for a while.
The daylight hours – how much time is there really?
Why then do I not exert myself?
Although the ancients are long gone,
Their wisdom must still be grasped.
From the empty eaves, water keeps on dripping,
From the censer, ashes fall marking the time.
This mood always brings me great pleasure,
As with both hands, I clasp my book tightly.
What a pity it is that ordinary people of the world
Know not this intimacy with the words of the wise!
Jingnuo, translated from the Chinese by Beata Grant
Like the poems from the last two weeks, this one involves our relationship to what we read and how we read it.
Jingnuo was a seventeenth-century Buddhist nun who lived in the Hangzhou province of China. Living apart from the world (which means only the social world), cut off from the entanglements and pressures, the tragedies and trivialities, of conventional social life, she has a certain freedom, which is dedicated to exploring the deeper spiritual aspects of life. Her guides are the thoughts, preserved in writing, of previous nuns and other spiritual sages. Even a single text opens up vistas of thought that remove her from the consciousness of self that limits each of us. Yet far from being lost in a sense of eternity, her religious dedication has given her a keen sense of the passing of time, of how limited and valuable it is – time's passing comes through not in sweeping statements about long spans or epochs, but in the mention of brief, measurable units that make up a life speeding by: the daylight hours, the dripping of water, the fall of ashes from a censer. Given her time and place, her hours of study would be limited by the amount of daylight available. Her awareness of the dripping water gives a sense that she is in as much silence as is possible in this world. The eaves are empty, yet water falls from them drop by drop; eventually it might wear away even a tough stone like granite. A footnote to the poem tells us that the "use of calibrated incense to keep time appears to have originated in Buddhist monasteries; later the 'incense-seal' became a widely used time-keeping device." We have a sense of solitude, of near silence, of near stillness, interrupted only by the gentle drip of water and the scented smoke rising up while the ashes fall down. Though in a state of deep contemplation, Jingnuo is aware of the world around her: the water drops, the ashes. She clasps her book tightly. Far from feeling lonely, isolated, or bored, or even solemn, she feels great joy; a sense of fullness and deep meaning permeates the scene she creates for us. As final proof of her compassionate awareness of the world's problems, she wishes that ordinary men and women could share this happy state that comes from continued intimacy with wise words.
For some ascetics, a love of Nature and poetry is a hindrance rather than a help on the way to enlightenment. Even those who found them useful gateways to spiritual awareness could not avoid a feeling that this, too, was vanity. In her biographical note on Jingnuo, Beata Grant (from whose anthology Daughters of Emptiness: Poems of Chinese Buddhist Nuns I took this poem) ends with these remarks: "Jingnuo also occasionally professed shame at the pleasure she derived from words. Late in life she is said to have noted to a disciple, somewhat ruefully, that 'The religious life does not rely on words and letters. I am already old, and I've managed to cleanse myself of all kinds of attachments; still I laugh at myself and this one remaining thought.' "
17 April 2015
13 April 2015
Poem of the Week 2015/15
A Study of Reading Habits
When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.
Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my cloak and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.
Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store,
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.
Philip Larkin
I thought this poem would make an interesting companion to last week's. Both involve speakers who, motivated mostly by love or just sex, reject the books they devoured in childhood. But last week's speaker does so because he finds their language inadequate to describe his adult love, and this speaker finds in them an exposure of his own inadequacy as an adult.
In the first stanza, the speaker reveals himself in his boyhood as that ill-fitting specimen, the student who hates school but loves to read. It might be the academic subjects, or resistance to regimentation, or social awkwardness, or a combination of these things and others, but the books he chooses provide a respite from all that. He's bookish, and his eyes are getting worse; we can assume he doesn't have any athletic ability to help him get by in his world, especially since his big dream is to have physical strength and skill, expressed heroically – his right hook will fell the hugest bad guys, and (just as important for his dream-vision of masculinity as being able to fight) he'll keep his cool the whole time. (You might be reminded of the snappy quips that muscular comic-book heroes always deliver with their lightning blows.)
The speaker is older in the second stanza: a teenager, and sex has taken over, as it does. He now wears thick glasses, the reward for "ruining his eyes" through his escape-hatch of reading. Once again he doesn't come right out and say he was unpopular or picked on, but once again it's implicit in what he now chooses to read: if girls liked him, he might continue in the hero vein as a romantic hero. Instead, his complicated feelings of fear, anger, and rejection express themselves in a rather sprightly way through vampire books (I should point out that this was written long before the Twilight series or even Anne Rice's Vampire Lestat series brought vampires back; those recent books are just further evidence of the deep-seated and widespread need the speaker is describing). He's not seducing women; he's "clubbing" them with sex (I'd assume club has a phallic implication here). He has ripping times in the dark – ripping is British slang (perhaps outdated by now?) for excellent, wonderful, but also brings with it thoughts of the bodice-ripper type of romance novel and a sulfuric whiff of Jack the Ripper and the prostitutes he murdered. But these angry emotions are complicated by reminders in the first and last lines of the stanza of just how far this fantasy is from what this boy's life must be: first the "inch-thick specs" he has to wear, and then the striking rhyme with fangs: meringues. I always find this word unexpected and a nice little surprise, undercutting the rest of the stanza with something sweet and fragile, a childish treat – a word that gives us more of what the speaker must seem like to others than the fantasy fangs of his favored books.
In the third stanza, the speaker has slumped into adulthood. The notes to the edition I used (for which see below) mention that here the "language is coloured by usage that is American or originally American"; this is interesting to me because, being American, I tend to think of American usage as usage. As you can tell from the spelling of colored in the quotation, the editor is British. Actually, what I get from this third stanza is not so much American usage (chap certainly is not) but the language of American westerns: dude meaning a citified, perhaps slightly effete or overly cultured man, fancily dressed and out of place on the rough and tumble range (not in its current meaning of just a guy); yellow (a variant is yellow-bellied) meaning cowardly; the hero who arrives in town as opposed to the storekeeper stuck there with his dull necessities. The speaker's reading, never very sophisticated, stays on the same ultimately unsatisfying level: life has forced him to admit to himself that he can never fulfill his adolescent fantasies, and the women (plural) he dreamed of conquering have been replaced by a girl (singular) whom he lets down. Slang and obscenity are always carefully used by Larkin, and the poem ends with a slide into exasperated, almost despairing coarseness. Sex and drunkenness are two of the most fertile sources of slang, and here the sexual longing rippling through the poem is rejected in favor of oblivious drinking: get stewed. The speaker finally rejects what has apparently been his only source of consolation into early manhood with a crude dismissal: books are a load of crap. It's shocking and funny, but also deeply sad, as it always is when a loved illusion is stripped away.
This final stanza seems like a demotic version of this section of Eliot's Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock: "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; / Am an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two, / Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, / Deferential, glad to be of use; / Politic, cautious, and meticulous; / Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; / At times, indeed, almost ridiculous – / Almost, at times, the Fool." Prufrock comes to the sad admission that he is not the questioning, intellectual Hamlet, star of the show, but the buffoonish counselor Polonius, casually murdered halfway through the play: Prufrock even omits the identifying I in the second line, leaving himself merely an implication of the verb am, and towards the end he illustrates how "politic, cautious, and meticulous" he is with his delicately placed, hesitant commas and qualifiers (indeed; almost; at times).
There are apparently people who think this poem is Larkin speaking of himself. In fairness to them, it is close enough to what we know of his physical appearance and complicated relationships with women to make that theory superficially plausible (though I find it difficult to believe that a professional librarian, formally astute poet, and Oxford graduate like Larkin would, when speaking in his own voice, misuse the objective case: Me and my cloak and fangs as the subject of the sentence – doesn't that tip people off?). Nabokov used to write scornfully of people who need to "identify with" or even just like a novel's characters, rather than admire the artist's skill in creating a world out of words. And I think that's some of what Larkin is getting at here: the use of reading (mostly novels, it appears; our speaker apparently avoids nonfiction or poetry) as an alternative to and escape from reality, and how reality eventually shows us who's boss. Even Don Quixote had to admit in the end that he was just an exhausted, unstable old man.
I took this from The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett.
When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.
Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my cloak and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.
Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store,
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.
Philip Larkin
I thought this poem would make an interesting companion to last week's. Both involve speakers who, motivated mostly by love or just sex, reject the books they devoured in childhood. But last week's speaker does so because he finds their language inadequate to describe his adult love, and this speaker finds in them an exposure of his own inadequacy as an adult.
In the first stanza, the speaker reveals himself in his boyhood as that ill-fitting specimen, the student who hates school but loves to read. It might be the academic subjects, or resistance to regimentation, or social awkwardness, or a combination of these things and others, but the books he chooses provide a respite from all that. He's bookish, and his eyes are getting worse; we can assume he doesn't have any athletic ability to help him get by in his world, especially since his big dream is to have physical strength and skill, expressed heroically – his right hook will fell the hugest bad guys, and (just as important for his dream-vision of masculinity as being able to fight) he'll keep his cool the whole time. (You might be reminded of the snappy quips that muscular comic-book heroes always deliver with their lightning blows.)
The speaker is older in the second stanza: a teenager, and sex has taken over, as it does. He now wears thick glasses, the reward for "ruining his eyes" through his escape-hatch of reading. Once again he doesn't come right out and say he was unpopular or picked on, but once again it's implicit in what he now chooses to read: if girls liked him, he might continue in the hero vein as a romantic hero. Instead, his complicated feelings of fear, anger, and rejection express themselves in a rather sprightly way through vampire books (I should point out that this was written long before the Twilight series or even Anne Rice's Vampire Lestat series brought vampires back; those recent books are just further evidence of the deep-seated and widespread need the speaker is describing). He's not seducing women; he's "clubbing" them with sex (I'd assume club has a phallic implication here). He has ripping times in the dark – ripping is British slang (perhaps outdated by now?) for excellent, wonderful, but also brings with it thoughts of the bodice-ripper type of romance novel and a sulfuric whiff of Jack the Ripper and the prostitutes he murdered. But these angry emotions are complicated by reminders in the first and last lines of the stanza of just how far this fantasy is from what this boy's life must be: first the "inch-thick specs" he has to wear, and then the striking rhyme with fangs: meringues. I always find this word unexpected and a nice little surprise, undercutting the rest of the stanza with something sweet and fragile, a childish treat – a word that gives us more of what the speaker must seem like to others than the fantasy fangs of his favored books.
In the third stanza, the speaker has slumped into adulthood. The notes to the edition I used (for which see below) mention that here the "language is coloured by usage that is American or originally American"; this is interesting to me because, being American, I tend to think of American usage as usage. As you can tell from the spelling of colored in the quotation, the editor is British. Actually, what I get from this third stanza is not so much American usage (chap certainly is not) but the language of American westerns: dude meaning a citified, perhaps slightly effete or overly cultured man, fancily dressed and out of place on the rough and tumble range (not in its current meaning of just a guy); yellow (a variant is yellow-bellied) meaning cowardly; the hero who arrives in town as opposed to the storekeeper stuck there with his dull necessities. The speaker's reading, never very sophisticated, stays on the same ultimately unsatisfying level: life has forced him to admit to himself that he can never fulfill his adolescent fantasies, and the women (plural) he dreamed of conquering have been replaced by a girl (singular) whom he lets down. Slang and obscenity are always carefully used by Larkin, and the poem ends with a slide into exasperated, almost despairing coarseness. Sex and drunkenness are two of the most fertile sources of slang, and here the sexual longing rippling through the poem is rejected in favor of oblivious drinking: get stewed. The speaker finally rejects what has apparently been his only source of consolation into early manhood with a crude dismissal: books are a load of crap. It's shocking and funny, but also deeply sad, as it always is when a loved illusion is stripped away.
This final stanza seems like a demotic version of this section of Eliot's Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock: "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; / Am an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two, / Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, / Deferential, glad to be of use; / Politic, cautious, and meticulous; / Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; / At times, indeed, almost ridiculous – / Almost, at times, the Fool." Prufrock comes to the sad admission that he is not the questioning, intellectual Hamlet, star of the show, but the buffoonish counselor Polonius, casually murdered halfway through the play: Prufrock even omits the identifying I in the second line, leaving himself merely an implication of the verb am, and towards the end he illustrates how "politic, cautious, and meticulous" he is with his delicately placed, hesitant commas and qualifiers (indeed; almost; at times).
There are apparently people who think this poem is Larkin speaking of himself. In fairness to them, it is close enough to what we know of his physical appearance and complicated relationships with women to make that theory superficially plausible (though I find it difficult to believe that a professional librarian, formally astute poet, and Oxford graduate like Larkin would, when speaking in his own voice, misuse the objective case: Me and my cloak and fangs as the subject of the sentence – doesn't that tip people off?). Nabokov used to write scornfully of people who need to "identify with" or even just like a novel's characters, rather than admire the artist's skill in creating a world out of words. And I think that's some of what Larkin is getting at here: the use of reading (mostly novels, it appears; our speaker apparently avoids nonfiction or poetry) as an alternative to and escape from reality, and how reality eventually shows us who's boss. Even Don Quixote had to admit in the end that he was just an exhausted, unstable old man.
I took this from The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett.
10 April 2015
06 April 2015
Poem of the Week 2015/14
Take all the books
That I read in my childhood,
Take all my school notebooks,
Take the chalk,
The pens,
And the blackboards,
But teach me a new word
To hang like an earring
On my lover's ear.
I want new fingers
To write in another way,
High like masts of ships,
Long like a giraffe's neck
So I can tailor for my beloved
A garment of poetry.
Nizar Qabbani, translated from the Arabic by Bassam K. Frangieh & Clementina R. Brown
Love poetry may be the most familiar of all types of poetry – in fact, I suspect that when a lot of people mention poetry what they really mean is love poetry. And so though each lover's love feels unique and radiantly special to him or her, to the reader it can all start to blur indistinguishably. Out of this dilemma Qabbani forms a distinctive love poem. He starts off by offering to surrender all the things that made him a user of language (that is, a poet): the books he read in childhood, the notebooks in which he did his lessons, the usual classroom equipment. But in exchange he asks for a new word. He doesn't specify what type of word, exactly, but it's clear from his simile (to hang like an earring / On my lover's ear) that it is a word related to his love. It must be stylish, beautiful, and valued, like the jewelry you would give someone you love, and it must hang by her ear, where she can always hear it whispering his message. Though others may see this word – it glitters right there from her earlobe – it really belongs only to her. In a delicate way, it pierces her flesh.
This word he seeks, the word that can express the love he feels, cannot be found in the standard vocabulary he learned in his childhood (perhaps there's an implication there that now that he feels love as a man, he cannot use a boy's vocabulary?). He clearly values the language he was taught and the books he read: as mentioned earlier, they're what formed him as a poet, and they're what he is using to write this poem; he must call on them even to express their own inadequacy. But they are not enough to express his elusive ecstasy. He feels that even his fingers need to be replaced to write as he wishes; he wants to change his body so that his fingers are almost comically high and long – covering vast areas, striking and graceful. He compares the fingers he would need to produce this new way of writing to the masts of ships (bringing to mind the voyages and explorations of old sailing ships, a way of adventuring into the unknown) and to the necks of giraffes (graceful, elegant, and undulating, belonging to creatures that walk gently on the earth).
These are striking and unusual comparisons – perhaps a movement towards the new language he needs to demonstrate his love. But they also hearken back to a very old tradition of Middle Eastern poetry, one that indicates love by comparisons to fruitful, bounteous things of the earth, which often leads to striking and even surreal images. This tradition is probably most familiar to English-language readers from the Song of Solomon: "Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes within thy locks; thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead. Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them." (Song of Solomon, Chapter 4, verses 1 - 2, King James translation). In the final lines of Qabbani's poem, the speaker's love mounts to such a pitch that he no longer wants just a word to hang in his beloved's ear; he wants to clothe her in an entire outfit spun of radiant poetry. He both implies and refutes the impossibility of finding new ways of expressing things that are universal and yet also individual.
Nizar Qabbani was a twentieth-century Syrian poet. I took this from the new anthology Arabic Poems, edited by Marlé Hammond, in the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet series. It includes the original Arabic on the facing page of each poem, if you can read that language (sadly, I can not).
And since this is National Poetry Month, here comes your annual reminder: with every poem I post I include a link to a place where you can purchase the book in which I found that poem. If you enjoy something I post, please buy the book if you can. The best way to show support for publishers who still issue poetry and to ensure its continued survival in our commercial society is to buy books of poems. You could do a whole lot worse than going to the Everyman's site and selecting any of their Pocket Poet series. I only have a few of their volumes dedicated to individual poets (I tend to favor buying complete works rather than selections), but I have many of their anthologies and can vouch for the thoughtfulness and care that go into both their selections and their design – they are handsome and enjoyable books to hold and read.
That I read in my childhood,
Take all my school notebooks,
Take the chalk,
The pens,
And the blackboards,
But teach me a new word
To hang like an earring
On my lover's ear.
I want new fingers
To write in another way,
High like masts of ships,
Long like a giraffe's neck
So I can tailor for my beloved
A garment of poetry.
Nizar Qabbani, translated from the Arabic by Bassam K. Frangieh & Clementina R. Brown
Love poetry may be the most familiar of all types of poetry – in fact, I suspect that when a lot of people mention poetry what they really mean is love poetry. And so though each lover's love feels unique and radiantly special to him or her, to the reader it can all start to blur indistinguishably. Out of this dilemma Qabbani forms a distinctive love poem. He starts off by offering to surrender all the things that made him a user of language (that is, a poet): the books he read in childhood, the notebooks in which he did his lessons, the usual classroom equipment. But in exchange he asks for a new word. He doesn't specify what type of word, exactly, but it's clear from his simile (to hang like an earring / On my lover's ear) that it is a word related to his love. It must be stylish, beautiful, and valued, like the jewelry you would give someone you love, and it must hang by her ear, where she can always hear it whispering his message. Though others may see this word – it glitters right there from her earlobe – it really belongs only to her. In a delicate way, it pierces her flesh.
This word he seeks, the word that can express the love he feels, cannot be found in the standard vocabulary he learned in his childhood (perhaps there's an implication there that now that he feels love as a man, he cannot use a boy's vocabulary?). He clearly values the language he was taught and the books he read: as mentioned earlier, they're what formed him as a poet, and they're what he is using to write this poem; he must call on them even to express their own inadequacy. But they are not enough to express his elusive ecstasy. He feels that even his fingers need to be replaced to write as he wishes; he wants to change his body so that his fingers are almost comically high and long – covering vast areas, striking and graceful. He compares the fingers he would need to produce this new way of writing to the masts of ships (bringing to mind the voyages and explorations of old sailing ships, a way of adventuring into the unknown) and to the necks of giraffes (graceful, elegant, and undulating, belonging to creatures that walk gently on the earth).
These are striking and unusual comparisons – perhaps a movement towards the new language he needs to demonstrate his love. But they also hearken back to a very old tradition of Middle Eastern poetry, one that indicates love by comparisons to fruitful, bounteous things of the earth, which often leads to striking and even surreal images. This tradition is probably most familiar to English-language readers from the Song of Solomon: "Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes within thy locks; thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead. Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them." (Song of Solomon, Chapter 4, verses 1 - 2, King James translation). In the final lines of Qabbani's poem, the speaker's love mounts to such a pitch that he no longer wants just a word to hang in his beloved's ear; he wants to clothe her in an entire outfit spun of radiant poetry. He both implies and refutes the impossibility of finding new ways of expressing things that are universal and yet also individual.
Nizar Qabbani was a twentieth-century Syrian poet. I took this from the new anthology Arabic Poems, edited by Marlé Hammond, in the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet series. It includes the original Arabic on the facing page of each poem, if you can read that language (sadly, I can not).
And since this is National Poetry Month, here comes your annual reminder: with every poem I post I include a link to a place where you can purchase the book in which I found that poem. If you enjoy something I post, please buy the book if you can. The best way to show support for publishers who still issue poetry and to ensure its continued survival in our commercial society is to buy books of poems. You could do a whole lot worse than going to the Everyman's site and selecting any of their Pocket Poet series. I only have a few of their volumes dedicated to individual poets (I tend to favor buying complete works rather than selections), but I have many of their anthologies and can vouch for the thoughtfulness and care that go into both their selections and their design – they are handsome and enjoyable books to hold and read.
03 April 2015
01 April 2015
Poem of the Week bonus: #whanthataprilleday15
See here for an explanation of this holiday celebrating all old, middle, ancient, archaic, and even dead languages. For last year's entry see here. Then see below for this year's entry: a few lines from Silence, an Old French Arthurian romance about a girl raised as a boy. She is named Silence, because her true nature must be kept in silence until the king reverses his decree against women inheriting property. Among her various adventures, she wanders the land in the company of two minstrels. They have trained her in their art, but she so surpasses them that they feel their livelihood is threatened. They plan to kill her. She overhears their plot and saves herself by refusing to leave with them, in a dialogue tense with danger and double-meanings.
Interlined with the original Old French I've put the translation by Sarah Roche-Mahdi, who newly edited and translated this fascinating work. The work's opening line attributes it to the otherwise unknown and probably pseudonymous Master Heldris of Cornwall. The unique manuscript was only rediscovered in 1911, in a British manor house in a box marked "old papers – no value."
"Amis," font il, "ne vos cremés.
"Friend," they said, "don't worry.
Nos amons vos, vus nos amés.
We are loyal to you, as you are to us.
Quant dites qu'estes si haïs,
When you say you feel threatened,
Cremons que ne soiés traïs.
we, too, are afraid you might be in danger.
Se li malfaitor sont a destre,
If the criminals are on the right,
Acuellons la voie a senestre.
we will take the path to the left.
Ses encontrons par aventure
And if we should happen to encounter them,
Et faire nos voelent rancure,
and if they want to attack us,
Por nos meïsmes i serons.
we will all be there to help each other.
S'il i fierent, nos i ferrons."
If they strike, we strike, too."
"Dirai vos," fait il, "une rien:
"I have something to say to you," said Silence.
Je ne cuic pas, ains le sai bien
"I think, or rather, I know very well,
Que vos i ferrés volentiers.
that you will be only too happy to strike.
Et cil se guart endementiers,
In the meantime, the one who has to protect himself
Se il violt, qui a garder s'a,
had better be on his guard, if he wants to defend himself;
U s'il nel fait que fols fera.
And if he doesn't do this, he is a fool.
Segnor, jo que vos celeroie?
Gentlemen, why should I not speak openly?
Mes enemis enconterroie
Se jo aloie o vos en France,
Cho sachiés vos tolt a fiänce;
You know very well indeed
that I would encounter my enemies
whether I went with you to France
U s'o vos aloie en Espagne,
or whether I went with you to Spain
En Alvergne, u en Alemagne.
or Auvergne or Germany.
Si me vient chi miols remanoir,
Therefore, it would be much better for me to stay here
Qu'aler allors por pis avoir.
than to go somewhere else and be worse off.
Jo remanrai, cho est la some,
In short, I'm staying here.
Et vos end irés com prodome
And you will go off, like upright
Et bone gent, bien le savés.
and honest men, make no mistake about that.
Si com vos viers moi fait avés,
As you have done to me,
Vos rendie Dex le gueredon;
may God do to you in return;
Por tel deserte altretel don.
may you receive your just deserts.
Moult m'avés fait, plus eüsciés
You have done much for me,
Se moi faire le peüssciés.
and would have done more if you could have.
En vos servir ai jo perdu."
I haven't been able to do quite enough for you."
Li jogleör sont esperdu.
The minstrels were undone.
Aportent le gaäig avant,
They took out the earnings
Se li ont dit par avenant:
and graciously said to him,
"Sire, amis chiers, prendés vo part."
"Dear friend, good sir, take your share."
Et l'enfes .c. mars en depart./
Then the youth took a hundred marks as his portion,
A çals en lasce plus de .c.,
and left them more than a hundred,
Et cil s'en vont hastivement.
and they took off in a hurry.
Silence, ll 3437 - 3476, translated and edited by Sarah Roche-Mahdi
In line 3466 of the translation I've corrected just desserts to just deserts.
Interlined with the original Old French I've put the translation by Sarah Roche-Mahdi, who newly edited and translated this fascinating work. The work's opening line attributes it to the otherwise unknown and probably pseudonymous Master Heldris of Cornwall. The unique manuscript was only rediscovered in 1911, in a British manor house in a box marked "old papers – no value."
"Amis," font il, "ne vos cremés.
"Friend," they said, "don't worry.
Nos amons vos, vus nos amés.
We are loyal to you, as you are to us.
Quant dites qu'estes si haïs,
When you say you feel threatened,
Cremons que ne soiés traïs.
we, too, are afraid you might be in danger.
Se li malfaitor sont a destre,
If the criminals are on the right,
Acuellons la voie a senestre.
we will take the path to the left.
Ses encontrons par aventure
And if we should happen to encounter them,
Et faire nos voelent rancure,
and if they want to attack us,
Por nos meïsmes i serons.
we will all be there to help each other.
S'il i fierent, nos i ferrons."
If they strike, we strike, too."
"Dirai vos," fait il, "une rien:
"I have something to say to you," said Silence.
Je ne cuic pas, ains le sai bien
"I think, or rather, I know very well,
Que vos i ferrés volentiers.
that you will be only too happy to strike.
Et cil se guart endementiers,
In the meantime, the one who has to protect himself
Se il violt, qui a garder s'a,
had better be on his guard, if he wants to defend himself;
U s'il nel fait que fols fera.
And if he doesn't do this, he is a fool.
Segnor, jo que vos celeroie?
Gentlemen, why should I not speak openly?
Mes enemis enconterroie
Se jo aloie o vos en France,
Cho sachiés vos tolt a fiänce;
You know very well indeed
that I would encounter my enemies
whether I went with you to France
U s'o vos aloie en Espagne,
or whether I went with you to Spain
En Alvergne, u en Alemagne.
or Auvergne or Germany.
Si me vient chi miols remanoir,
Therefore, it would be much better for me to stay here
Qu'aler allors por pis avoir.
than to go somewhere else and be worse off.
Jo remanrai, cho est la some,
In short, I'm staying here.
Et vos end irés com prodome
And you will go off, like upright
Et bone gent, bien le savés.
and honest men, make no mistake about that.
Si com vos viers moi fait avés,
As you have done to me,
Vos rendie Dex le gueredon;
may God do to you in return;
Por tel deserte altretel don.
may you receive your just deserts.
Moult m'avés fait, plus eüsciés
You have done much for me,
Se moi faire le peüssciés.
and would have done more if you could have.
En vos servir ai jo perdu."
I haven't been able to do quite enough for you."
Li jogleör sont esperdu.
The minstrels were undone.
Aportent le gaäig avant,
They took out the earnings
Se li ont dit par avenant:
and graciously said to him,
"Sire, amis chiers, prendés vo part."
"Dear friend, good sir, take your share."
Et l'enfes .c. mars en depart./
Then the youth took a hundred marks as his portion,
A çals en lasce plus de .c.,
and left them more than a hundred,
Et cil s'en vont hastivement.
and they took off in a hurry.
Silence, ll 3437 - 3476, translated and edited by Sarah Roche-Mahdi
In line 3466 of the translation I've corrected just desserts to just deserts.
30 March 2015
Poem of the Week 2015/13
Epitaph
Here lie John Hughes and Sarah Drew.
Perhaps you'll say, what's that to you?
Believe me, friend, much may be said
On this poor couple that are dead.
On Sunday next they should have married:
But see how oddly things are carried.
On Thursday last it rained and lightened:
These tender lovers, sadly frightened,
Sheltered beneath the cocking hay,
In hopes to pass the storm away.
But the bold thunder found them out
(Commissioned for that end, no doubt)
And, seizing on their trembling breath,
Consigned them to the shades of death.
Who knows if 'twas not kindly done?
For had they seen the next year's sun,
A beaten wife and cuckold swain
Had jointly cursed the marriage chain.
Now they are happy in their doom,
For P[ope] has wrote upon their tomb.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Usually I pretty much ignore the lives of the poets and concentrate on the single poem for the week, figuring that it's easy enough for anyone reading this to do a little web research if he or she so wishes, but I would like to encourage you to look up Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: she had a fascinating life and I would willingly read a full-length biography of her and not just a Wikipedia article. Though she wrote poetry she is best remembered for her Turkish Embassy Letters, written while her husband was British ambassador in what is now Istanbul. She knew or was related to many of the major British figures of her time (her time being 1689 to 1762); this particular poem was inspired by her then-friend Alexander Pope, who was seen even then as the major poet of his day (they later had a falling-out and sniped at each other viciously in various poems). So let's look at the epitaph by Pope that she refers to in her final line:
Epitaphs on Two Lovers Struck Dead by Lightning
On the same pile their faithful Fair expire;
Here pitying Heav'n that Virtue Mutual found,
And blasted both, that it might neither wound.
Hearts so sincere th'Almighty saw well pleas'd,
Sent his own lightning, and the victims seiz'd.
II
Think not by rig'rous judgment seized,
A pair so faithful could expire;
Victims so pure Heav'n saw well pleas'd,
And snatch'd them in celestial fire.
III
Live well, and fear no sudden fate:
When God calls Virtue to the grave,
Alike 't is Justice, soon or late,
Mercy alike to kill or save.
Virtue unmov'd can hear the call,
And face the flash that melts the ball.
Alexander Pope
Rather oddly for someone famed for satirical wit, Pope takes an elevated and even heroic stance here, suggesting that the dead pair were such models of loving virtue that they were taken to Heaven together, sparing them separation in this world (and blasted both, that it might neither wound). He begins with a reference to the Hindu practice of suttee, in which a widow joins the funeral pyre of her late husband (his use of lovers to refer to the men and the Fair to refer to the women is typical usage of the period). He is presenting this immolation as a sign of devoted mutual love and the lightning strike as a seal of Heavenly approval. It's interesting that he uses what would have been for the time an exotic reference to "Eastern" practices, rather than to something from more familiar Greek mythology. Perhaps the reference was made with Montagu's Turkish residence in mind, or more generally as a sign of growing British interest in and knowledge of a part of the world they were already starting to move in on, or perhaps it was just an intriguing and unusual bit of color, a variant from the inevitable Greek and Roman classics. In his second stanza the poet assures us that the lightning was a sign of God's approbation, not His anger (Think not by rig'rous judgment seized, / . . . Victims so pure Heav'n saw well pleas'd). In the third stanza, he draws a general moral: a virtuous, well-lived life leaves you ready for the grave at any time. He's advocating a stoic approach: indifferent to life's vagaries, Virtue can hear the call of death without being moved to emotions either sad or joyful. Pope hints at a Christian underpinning to this philosophy: such an exemplar of Virtue can face with equanimity even the Last Judgment (the flash that melts the ball; I take the ball to be our planet).
Montagu responds with an amused, more down-to-earth rival epitaph. She begins by naming the dead lovers, but on their own the names don't mean anything to most of us: we do not know them, and are therefore indifferent to the deaths of these fellow humans (Perhaps you'll say, what's that to you?). She finds the accident that killed them not noble or tragic but odd, an example of the peculiar things that can happen (but see how oddly things are carried). She describes the lovers frightened by the storm (lightened means lightning was striking). The language here feels suggestive to me, as if she's undercutting Pope's assertions of virtue, which in this context implies chastity. Cocking hay refers to hay cocks, which are small heaps of hay piled up temporarily, but it wouldn't surprise me if Montagu were punning on cock meaning penis. The bold (perhaps because intrusive on a tryst?) thunder finds the pair, and with offhand irony (Commissioned for that end, no doubt) the poet undercuts the idea that this death was a deliberate act by Heaven. She then wonders, with compassionate cynicism, if perhaps the death of the engaged couple might actually have been the kindest thing fate could have done to them: married even for only a year, she would have cheated on him, he would have beaten her, and both would have regretted the matrimonial chains. She ends by suggesting that their unusual death should really be seen as a cause of happiness for them, since it has prompted the greatest poet of his time to write some lines about them. Though this sentiment seems to be mostly about Pope's fame (especially given that she's been undercutting his poem all along), it does hearken back to a familiar poetic trope, that someone or something will find lasting fame only in the words of the poet (for an example, see Shakespeare's Sonnet 55, Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes). And indeed she was accurate here; John Hughes and Sarah Drew would be long forgotten if not for Pope – and also for Montagu; though she mentions Pope specifically, her own poem has also preserved the dead lovers for us.
I took the Montagu poem from Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology, edited by Roger Lonsdale. The Pope is not in the copy of his work I have; I found it on the Internet. Presumably as a fairly minor poem by him it would only be in a collection of his complete poems, if you can find one.
Here lie John Hughes and Sarah Drew.
Perhaps you'll say, what's that to you?
Believe me, friend, much may be said
On this poor couple that are dead.
On Sunday next they should have married:
But see how oddly things are carried.
On Thursday last it rained and lightened:
These tender lovers, sadly frightened,
Sheltered beneath the cocking hay,
In hopes to pass the storm away.
But the bold thunder found them out
(Commissioned for that end, no doubt)
And, seizing on their trembling breath,
Consigned them to the shades of death.
Who knows if 'twas not kindly done?
For had they seen the next year's sun,
A beaten wife and cuckold swain
Had jointly cursed the marriage chain.
Now they are happy in their doom,
For P[ope] has wrote upon their tomb.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Usually I pretty much ignore the lives of the poets and concentrate on the single poem for the week, figuring that it's easy enough for anyone reading this to do a little web research if he or she so wishes, but I would like to encourage you to look up Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: she had a fascinating life and I would willingly read a full-length biography of her and not just a Wikipedia article. Though she wrote poetry she is best remembered for her Turkish Embassy Letters, written while her husband was British ambassador in what is now Istanbul. She knew or was related to many of the major British figures of her time (her time being 1689 to 1762); this particular poem was inspired by her then-friend Alexander Pope, who was seen even then as the major poet of his day (they later had a falling-out and sniped at each other viciously in various poems). So let's look at the epitaph by Pope that she refers to in her final line:
Epitaphs on Two Lovers Struck Dead by Lightning
I
When Eastern lovers feed the Funeral Fire,On the same pile their faithful Fair expire;
Here pitying Heav'n that Virtue Mutual found,
And blasted both, that it might neither wound.
Hearts so sincere th'Almighty saw well pleas'd,
Sent his own lightning, and the victims seiz'd.
II
Think not by rig'rous judgment seized,
A pair so faithful could expire;
Victims so pure Heav'n saw well pleas'd,
And snatch'd them in celestial fire.
III
Live well, and fear no sudden fate:
When God calls Virtue to the grave,
Alike 't is Justice, soon or late,
Mercy alike to kill or save.
Virtue unmov'd can hear the call,
And face the flash that melts the ball.
Alexander Pope
Rather oddly for someone famed for satirical wit, Pope takes an elevated and even heroic stance here, suggesting that the dead pair were such models of loving virtue that they were taken to Heaven together, sparing them separation in this world (and blasted both, that it might neither wound). He begins with a reference to the Hindu practice of suttee, in which a widow joins the funeral pyre of her late husband (his use of lovers to refer to the men and the Fair to refer to the women is typical usage of the period). He is presenting this immolation as a sign of devoted mutual love and the lightning strike as a seal of Heavenly approval. It's interesting that he uses what would have been for the time an exotic reference to "Eastern" practices, rather than to something from more familiar Greek mythology. Perhaps the reference was made with Montagu's Turkish residence in mind, or more generally as a sign of growing British interest in and knowledge of a part of the world they were already starting to move in on, or perhaps it was just an intriguing and unusual bit of color, a variant from the inevitable Greek and Roman classics. In his second stanza the poet assures us that the lightning was a sign of God's approbation, not His anger (Think not by rig'rous judgment seized, / . . . Victims so pure Heav'n saw well pleas'd). In the third stanza, he draws a general moral: a virtuous, well-lived life leaves you ready for the grave at any time. He's advocating a stoic approach: indifferent to life's vagaries, Virtue can hear the call of death without being moved to emotions either sad or joyful. Pope hints at a Christian underpinning to this philosophy: such an exemplar of Virtue can face with equanimity even the Last Judgment (the flash that melts the ball; I take the ball to be our planet).
Montagu responds with an amused, more down-to-earth rival epitaph. She begins by naming the dead lovers, but on their own the names don't mean anything to most of us: we do not know them, and are therefore indifferent to the deaths of these fellow humans (Perhaps you'll say, what's that to you?). She finds the accident that killed them not noble or tragic but odd, an example of the peculiar things that can happen (but see how oddly things are carried). She describes the lovers frightened by the storm (lightened means lightning was striking). The language here feels suggestive to me, as if she's undercutting Pope's assertions of virtue, which in this context implies chastity. Cocking hay refers to hay cocks, which are small heaps of hay piled up temporarily, but it wouldn't surprise me if Montagu were punning on cock meaning penis. The bold (perhaps because intrusive on a tryst?) thunder finds the pair, and with offhand irony (Commissioned for that end, no doubt) the poet undercuts the idea that this death was a deliberate act by Heaven. She then wonders, with compassionate cynicism, if perhaps the death of the engaged couple might actually have been the kindest thing fate could have done to them: married even for only a year, she would have cheated on him, he would have beaten her, and both would have regretted the matrimonial chains. She ends by suggesting that their unusual death should really be seen as a cause of happiness for them, since it has prompted the greatest poet of his time to write some lines about them. Though this sentiment seems to be mostly about Pope's fame (especially given that she's been undercutting his poem all along), it does hearken back to a familiar poetic trope, that someone or something will find lasting fame only in the words of the poet (for an example, see Shakespeare's Sonnet 55, Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes). And indeed she was accurate here; John Hughes and Sarah Drew would be long forgotten if not for Pope – and also for Montagu; though she mentions Pope specifically, her own poem has also preserved the dead lovers for us.
I took the Montagu poem from Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology, edited by Roger Lonsdale. The Pope is not in the copy of his work I have; I found it on the Internet. Presumably as a fairly minor poem by him it would only be in a collection of his complete poems, if you can find one.
29 March 2015
fun stuff I may or may not get to: April 2015
a warning about BART
So once again I have to start off a monthly preview with a long-range warning about BART: on certain weekends starting in April and continuing through August, they will not be running trains between the Fruitvale and Oakland Coliseum stations. They will instead have a "bus bridge" between the two, and are predicting delays of up to an hour – also, they won't be keeping to any schedules or timed transfers. (If past experience is any guideline, the delays will be longer and service even more inefficient than predicted.) The biggest effect will obviously be on those who take the Fremont or the Dublin/Pleasanton lines, but undoubtedly delays will ripple throughout the system and since BART is basically suggesting you just drive on those weekends, traffic will be that much worse (the weekends, by the way, include Easter Sunday and all of Memorial Day weekend – enjoy the holidays, everyone!). And though the buses will be free to BART riders, presumably once you reach Coliseum by bus you then need to re-enter the system and pay an additional fare to get where you're going after that. Oh, BART: your dedication to making every trip as irksome as possible is truly overwhelming. When it comes to letting me down, you never let me down.
Even setting aside the inconvenience and waste of time involved, I can't be the only one who is given pause at the thought of standing out at Fruitvale for up to an hour late at night waiting for a bus. So I now have to figure out what to do about several concerts for which I've already bought tickets, and I guess I'll just have to give up several other performances I was hoping to go to. You may find the list of dates here, and even if you've seen the list somewhere before you may want to check it again, since as I just noticed when I went to get the link the dates have been revised since the original announcement about a week ago, which makes me wonder how thought-through this thing is.
The reason for the shut-down is to replace the track between the two stations. Sure, maintenance is crucial (and clearly they've been neglecting it for years), but even if I take their word for it (because, you know, BART has been so trustworthy!) that they need to stop operations for 11 or 12 weekends to make the fix . . . well, I find it hard to believe that the track between Fruitvale and Oakland Coliseum is the only one that needs replacing. Are we going to have to deal with this sort of thing sneaking up on us randomly for the next decade?
I'm just not willing to cut this incompetently managed system any slack. It's typical of my feelings about them that several years ago, when I was at the Berkeley station waiting for a train late at night after a concert, and I heard the station agent on the loudspeaker saying, "To the young man urinating on the platform: please do not do that" my first thought was not how gross the guy was being but that if BART would re-open its already inadequate bathrooms maybe he wouldn't need to piss on the platform – I mean, I doubt he was doing it for kicks. (After 9/11 the bathrooms were closed in several stations "for security reasons" because the terrorists; those stations all tended to be in areas with a high concentration of homeless people, which I'm sure was a complete coincidence. I should point out that in this case the platform pisser was not a homeless guy but probably a student at Cal, who looked as if he were going to the city with friends to go clubbing.)
Even the way BART slipped this news out shows how inept they are: None of the regular BART riders I have spoken to about this had heard anything about it. I, who ride BART almost every day, have heard no announcements and seen no messages in the stations; nothing has been sent to Clipper Card holders. . . . Who knows when I would have heard about this if I hadn't chanced upon an article on SFGate.com one recent morning – but when I went back an hour later the article was off their main page. There's just a discreet little link off to the side on the BART website to reassure me that I didn't just hallucinate the whole thing. Honestly: you cannot repeat information like this too often, because people just don't pay attention. Case in point: the SFGate article clearly mentioned that the closures were planned around the Oakland A's homestands, yet at least three comments of the maybe two dozen I read complained that this would affect people going to A's games at the Coliseum – even though, you know, it was right there in the article that the dates were picked so that it wouldn't affect those people. Of course, when the A's are away, the Giants usually are playing at home in San Francisco, so I guess if you're a Giants fan who lives in the East Bay, you're boned.
What really breaks what's left of my heart about this is that I truly believe in public transportation. I don't drive and rely on BART, but even more than that, I believe it's necessary for the environment that public transportation be made as desirable and convenient as possible – and even more than that, I believe it's crucial for us as a society to learn how to share public spaces together. Car culture is sick for more than the environmental reasons. I used to vote automatically in favor of any public-transportation measure. Now I automatically vote against anything that will give more money to BART, at least until transit strikes are banned and they get their spending under control (to make it clear: this is not an anti-union dog-whistle; I've discussed my feelings about the BART unions before so I won't repeat them, but I'm also talking about the incompetent management and the general amount they waste on things like, random example, overheating the cars when everyone who's riding is dressed for outdoors anyway). Voting against more funds for BART may seem like shooting myself in the foot, but what am I getting out of my increased fees and taxes? BART has shown itself an incompetent manager of public money; they get more and more and we've been getting less and less. I'll define what I mean by the "improved service" I'd like to see: (1) full-length trains (and I mean ten cars, which I rarely see even at rush hours, and I ride three of the four BART lines regularly) that (2) come more often (it's ridiculous to wait 20 minutes or more for a train). Oh, there are other things that should be dealt with – the poor station design, the inadequate train announcements, and so forth – but really: full-length trains, and more often. But BART can't even get that much right.
Anyway: exercise caution when buying weekend tickets, if you are BART-dependent, and even if you're not make sure you know the dates and leave yourself plenty of driving time.
Theatrical
Shotgun Players presents a reading of Adrienne Kennedy's The Ohio State Murders, 27 - 28 April, starting at 7:00 each night.
This may make it look as if there are slim theatrical pickings for April, but many of the shows listed last month are continuing into this month, so check those out as well.
Operatic
The Lamplighters present an attractive rarity: The Grand Duke, the last collaboration between WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, for four performances only: 25 - 26 April at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, 30 April in Mountain View, and 2 May in Walnut Creek.
Soloists from San Francisco Opera's Adler program will join Philharmonia Baroque in a production of Rossini's La cambiale di matrimonio (The Marriage Contract), along with some Mozart numbers. That's 15 and 17 - 19 April in their usual various locations.
The San Francisco Symphony presents John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists in Monteverdi's L'Orfeo on 27 April. Sadly it's in Davies Hall, which is about as far as you can get from an intimate Renaissance court theater, but you can't have everything.
The San Francisco Conservatory of Music presents Donizetti's L'Elisir d'amore, fully staged (by Jose Maria Condemi) and with a full orchestra (conducted by Scott Sandmeier), on 2 and 4 April.
Strings
San Francisco Performances presents violinist Hilary Hahn and pianist Corey Smythe in a program of works by Cage, Lang, Bach, Auerbach, and Schumann on 18 April.
Piano
San Francisco Performances presents Garrick Ohlsson in an all-Scriabin program on 6 April (this concert was rescheduled from 14 March) and Dubravka Tomsic in a program of Haydn, Beethoven, and Chopin on 19 April.
Dance
San Francisco Performances presents the Paul Taylor Dance Company in three different programs, 15 - 18 April at the Yerba Buena Center.
Cal Performances presents the annual visit of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, with three different programs from 21 to 26 April.
The Shostakovich Trilogy, choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky, returns to San Francisco Ballet from 8 - 19 April; their other offering this month is a mixed bill of Caprice by Helgi Tomasson, the world premiere of Swimmer by Yuri Possokhov, and Balanchine's Four Temperaments, and that runs 10 - 21 April.
Choral
Cappella SF, led by Ragnar Bohlin, returns on 11 April with a program of "vocal music written in an orchestral style" with composers ranging from Gabrieli and Bach to contemporary composers like David Conte and Elliott Encarnación (who also sings tenor in the group). That's at the Mission Dolores Basilica (right next to Mission Dolores itself, an easy walk from the 16th Street BART station).
Early/Baroque Music
Cal Performances presents the Tallis Scholars on 10 - 11 April, in a different program each night.
Modern/Contemporary Music
The California Institute of Integral Studies presents the complete string quartets of John Zorn, played by the JACK Quartet (with soprano Tony Arnold). That's 30 April at the Palace of Fine Arts (seems like an odd venue to me – not that easy to get to; I've been to the Palace of Fine Arts but never for a concert so I don't know how suitable the hall is there).
Cal Performances presents the eco ensemble, conducted by David Milnes, playing works by Bedrossian, Leroux, and Campion on 25 April.
The San Francisco Conservatory of Music's baroque ensemble ventures into new music with Elinor Armer's Leonardo's Riddle, featuring Adam Cockerham on archlute. That's on 19 April, in the afternoon.
At the Center for New Music, the Plath Project concert I mentioned last month is now scheduled for 26 April.
Old First Concerts presents the Wooden Fish Ensemble in a celebration of the 70th birthday of Belgian composer Boudewijn Buckinx. The works by Buckinx include The Floating World, a large-scale piano piece written for Thomas Schultz, a founding member of Wooden Fish, as well as works by Hyo-shin Na in honor of Buckinx. That's on 12 April. On 24 April, they present the Friction Quartet playing the John Adams String Quartet along with world premieres by Max Stoffregen and Eric Tran.
Vocalists
Cal Performances presents tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Wenwen Du in a program exploring the music and poetry of World War I. That's on 12 April. This looks like a highlight for this month!
Symphonic
Pablo Heras-Casado leads the San Francisco Symphony in a couple of programs: the first features Joshua Bell playing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto along with Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No 1 and John Adams's Chamber Symphony, and you can catch that on 9 - 12 April; he's then leading a program of the Haydn 44, the Mozart Piano Concerto 9 with Igor Levit, Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and the Stravinsky Symphony in Three Movement on 18 - 19 April. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts Ravel's Mother Goose Suite, Stravinsky's Firebird, and his own Nyx on 30 April and 1 - 3 May.
Joana Carneiro leads the Berkeley Symphony in a thoughtful coupling of Mozart's Requiem with Choruses from the Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams; that's on 30 April.
So once again I have to start off a monthly preview with a long-range warning about BART: on certain weekends starting in April and continuing through August, they will not be running trains between the Fruitvale and Oakland Coliseum stations. They will instead have a "bus bridge" between the two, and are predicting delays of up to an hour – also, they won't be keeping to any schedules or timed transfers. (If past experience is any guideline, the delays will be longer and service even more inefficient than predicted.) The biggest effect will obviously be on those who take the Fremont or the Dublin/Pleasanton lines, but undoubtedly delays will ripple throughout the system and since BART is basically suggesting you just drive on those weekends, traffic will be that much worse (the weekends, by the way, include Easter Sunday and all of Memorial Day weekend – enjoy the holidays, everyone!). And though the buses will be free to BART riders, presumably once you reach Coliseum by bus you then need to re-enter the system and pay an additional fare to get where you're going after that. Oh, BART: your dedication to making every trip as irksome as possible is truly overwhelming. When it comes to letting me down, you never let me down.
Even setting aside the inconvenience and waste of time involved, I can't be the only one who is given pause at the thought of standing out at Fruitvale for up to an hour late at night waiting for a bus. So I now have to figure out what to do about several concerts for which I've already bought tickets, and I guess I'll just have to give up several other performances I was hoping to go to. You may find the list of dates here, and even if you've seen the list somewhere before you may want to check it again, since as I just noticed when I went to get the link the dates have been revised since the original announcement about a week ago, which makes me wonder how thought-through this thing is.
The reason for the shut-down is to replace the track between the two stations. Sure, maintenance is crucial (and clearly they've been neglecting it for years), but even if I take their word for it (because, you know, BART has been so trustworthy!) that they need to stop operations for 11 or 12 weekends to make the fix . . . well, I find it hard to believe that the track between Fruitvale and Oakland Coliseum is the only one that needs replacing. Are we going to have to deal with this sort of thing sneaking up on us randomly for the next decade?
I'm just not willing to cut this incompetently managed system any slack. It's typical of my feelings about them that several years ago, when I was at the Berkeley station waiting for a train late at night after a concert, and I heard the station agent on the loudspeaker saying, "To the young man urinating on the platform: please do not do that" my first thought was not how gross the guy was being but that if BART would re-open its already inadequate bathrooms maybe he wouldn't need to piss on the platform – I mean, I doubt he was doing it for kicks. (After 9/11 the bathrooms were closed in several stations "for security reasons" because the terrorists; those stations all tended to be in areas with a high concentration of homeless people, which I'm sure was a complete coincidence. I should point out that in this case the platform pisser was not a homeless guy but probably a student at Cal, who looked as if he were going to the city with friends to go clubbing.)
Even the way BART slipped this news out shows how inept they are: None of the regular BART riders I have spoken to about this had heard anything about it. I, who ride BART almost every day, have heard no announcements and seen no messages in the stations; nothing has been sent to Clipper Card holders. . . . Who knows when I would have heard about this if I hadn't chanced upon an article on SFGate.com one recent morning – but when I went back an hour later the article was off their main page. There's just a discreet little link off to the side on the BART website to reassure me that I didn't just hallucinate the whole thing. Honestly: you cannot repeat information like this too often, because people just don't pay attention. Case in point: the SFGate article clearly mentioned that the closures were planned around the Oakland A's homestands, yet at least three comments of the maybe two dozen I read complained that this would affect people going to A's games at the Coliseum – even though, you know, it was right there in the article that the dates were picked so that it wouldn't affect those people. Of course, when the A's are away, the Giants usually are playing at home in San Francisco, so I guess if you're a Giants fan who lives in the East Bay, you're boned.
What really breaks what's left of my heart about this is that I truly believe in public transportation. I don't drive and rely on BART, but even more than that, I believe it's necessary for the environment that public transportation be made as desirable and convenient as possible – and even more than that, I believe it's crucial for us as a society to learn how to share public spaces together. Car culture is sick for more than the environmental reasons. I used to vote automatically in favor of any public-transportation measure. Now I automatically vote against anything that will give more money to BART, at least until transit strikes are banned and they get their spending under control (to make it clear: this is not an anti-union dog-whistle; I've discussed my feelings about the BART unions before so I won't repeat them, but I'm also talking about the incompetent management and the general amount they waste on things like, random example, overheating the cars when everyone who's riding is dressed for outdoors anyway). Voting against more funds for BART may seem like shooting myself in the foot, but what am I getting out of my increased fees and taxes? BART has shown itself an incompetent manager of public money; they get more and more and we've been getting less and less. I'll define what I mean by the "improved service" I'd like to see: (1) full-length trains (and I mean ten cars, which I rarely see even at rush hours, and I ride three of the four BART lines regularly) that (2) come more often (it's ridiculous to wait 20 minutes or more for a train). Oh, there are other things that should be dealt with – the poor station design, the inadequate train announcements, and so forth – but really: full-length trains, and more often. But BART can't even get that much right.
Anyway: exercise caution when buying weekend tickets, if you are BART-dependent, and even if you're not make sure you know the dates and leave yourself plenty of driving time.
Theatrical
Shotgun Players presents a reading of Adrienne Kennedy's The Ohio State Murders, 27 - 28 April, starting at 7:00 each night.
This may make it look as if there are slim theatrical pickings for April, but many of the shows listed last month are continuing into this month, so check those out as well.
Operatic
The Lamplighters present an attractive rarity: The Grand Duke, the last collaboration between WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, for four performances only: 25 - 26 April at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, 30 April in Mountain View, and 2 May in Walnut Creek.
Soloists from San Francisco Opera's Adler program will join Philharmonia Baroque in a production of Rossini's La cambiale di matrimonio (The Marriage Contract), along with some Mozart numbers. That's 15 and 17 - 19 April in their usual various locations.
The San Francisco Symphony presents John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists in Monteverdi's L'Orfeo on 27 April. Sadly it's in Davies Hall, which is about as far as you can get from an intimate Renaissance court theater, but you can't have everything.
The San Francisco Conservatory of Music presents Donizetti's L'Elisir d'amore, fully staged (by Jose Maria Condemi) and with a full orchestra (conducted by Scott Sandmeier), on 2 and 4 April.
Strings
San Francisco Performances presents violinist Hilary Hahn and pianist Corey Smythe in a program of works by Cage, Lang, Bach, Auerbach, and Schumann on 18 April.
Piano
San Francisco Performances presents Garrick Ohlsson in an all-Scriabin program on 6 April (this concert was rescheduled from 14 March) and Dubravka Tomsic in a program of Haydn, Beethoven, and Chopin on 19 April.
Dance
San Francisco Performances presents the Paul Taylor Dance Company in three different programs, 15 - 18 April at the Yerba Buena Center.
Cal Performances presents the annual visit of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, with three different programs from 21 to 26 April.
The Shostakovich Trilogy, choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky, returns to San Francisco Ballet from 8 - 19 April; their other offering this month is a mixed bill of Caprice by Helgi Tomasson, the world premiere of Swimmer by Yuri Possokhov, and Balanchine's Four Temperaments, and that runs 10 - 21 April.
Choral
Cappella SF, led by Ragnar Bohlin, returns on 11 April with a program of "vocal music written in an orchestral style" with composers ranging from Gabrieli and Bach to contemporary composers like David Conte and Elliott Encarnación (who also sings tenor in the group). That's at the Mission Dolores Basilica (right next to Mission Dolores itself, an easy walk from the 16th Street BART station).
Early/Baroque Music
Cal Performances presents the Tallis Scholars on 10 - 11 April, in a different program each night.
Modern/Contemporary Music
The California Institute of Integral Studies presents the complete string quartets of John Zorn, played by the JACK Quartet (with soprano Tony Arnold). That's 30 April at the Palace of Fine Arts (seems like an odd venue to me – not that easy to get to; I've been to the Palace of Fine Arts but never for a concert so I don't know how suitable the hall is there).
Cal Performances presents the eco ensemble, conducted by David Milnes, playing works by Bedrossian, Leroux, and Campion on 25 April.
The San Francisco Conservatory of Music's baroque ensemble ventures into new music with Elinor Armer's Leonardo's Riddle, featuring Adam Cockerham on archlute. That's on 19 April, in the afternoon.
At the Center for New Music, the Plath Project concert I mentioned last month is now scheduled for 26 April.
Old First Concerts presents the Wooden Fish Ensemble in a celebration of the 70th birthday of Belgian composer Boudewijn Buckinx. The works by Buckinx include The Floating World, a large-scale piano piece written for Thomas Schultz, a founding member of Wooden Fish, as well as works by Hyo-shin Na in honor of Buckinx. That's on 12 April. On 24 April, they present the Friction Quartet playing the John Adams String Quartet along with world premieres by Max Stoffregen and Eric Tran.
Vocalists
Cal Performances presents tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Wenwen Du in a program exploring the music and poetry of World War I. That's on 12 April. This looks like a highlight for this month!
Symphonic
Pablo Heras-Casado leads the San Francisco Symphony in a couple of programs: the first features Joshua Bell playing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto along with Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No 1 and John Adams's Chamber Symphony, and you can catch that on 9 - 12 April; he's then leading a program of the Haydn 44, the Mozart Piano Concerto 9 with Igor Levit, Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and the Stravinsky Symphony in Three Movement on 18 - 19 April. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts Ravel's Mother Goose Suite, Stravinsky's Firebird, and his own Nyx on 30 April and 1 - 3 May.
Joana Carneiro leads the Berkeley Symphony in a thoughtful coupling of Mozart's Requiem with Choruses from the Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams; that's on 30 April.
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